


the ties that bind

by damaskrose



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (i imagine just before the last scene), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Canon Compliant, Drowning, F/F, Fate, Fate & Destiny, Guilt, Mythology References, Post-Canon, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25499335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damaskrose/pseuds/damaskrose
Summary: “There’s a story I heard many times,” Andy begins, “in the Mediterranean. Threads of fate and three sisters. One to spin, one to measure, and one to cut.”
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Quynh | Noriko, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 7
Kudos: 121





	the ties that bind

**Author's Note:**

> *blows conductor whistle* All aboard the Andy/Quynh angst train!  
> Title from the eponymous song by the Mechanisms

_ what do you call a feeling _

_ that no longer lives in your body? _

—Olivia Gatwood, “In the Future, I Love the Nighttime”

After five hundred years, the memories begin to fade. The exact cadence of Quynh’s laugh. The precise angle she tilted her head when deep in thought. Andy clutches tight to the remaining ones: the feel of Quynh’s hips beneath her hands, the shiver of her long hair against Andy’s bare shoulders, the soft noises Quynh made in sleep.

The memories fade, after five hundred years. But the pain never ebbs.

Andy uncaps the bottle of vodka and takes a deep swig, heedless of the burn that sears its way down her throat. Immortal bodies have their perks, but Andy would never consider the fast-metabolism barrier to getting drunk one of them. Some nights she needs the escape, but it can take almost to the bottom of a bottle to truly dull the edge.

She takes another swig, half-relishing the painful bite of the alcohol. She tips her head back and drinks deep, again and again and again, until she almost chokes, the liquid bubbling in her throat.

It takes sixty seconds to drown. Andy doesn’t know where she learned that, but it sounds right. Count the seconds right and it can feel like an eternity. Or like nothing at all.

Five hundred years, a minute at a time. Drowning after drowning after drowning after drowning. It’s unfathomable, and that’s coming from a woman who’s seen civilizations rise and fall into dust.

The kitchen light flicks on and Andy’s head snaps up. She expects it’s Joe, downstairs for a midnight snack he’ll then protest innocence of when Nicky notices the last of the ice cream gone in the morning.

But it’s Nile, frozen with her finger still on the switch. Her eyes dart from Andy and back to the light switch, as if she’s contemplating flicking it off and returning upstairs without inquiring as to why Andy was sitting alone in the dark with a bottle of vodka when the rest of the world is asleep.

But she’s Nile, so of course she doesn’t do that.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Andy asks.

Nile shakes her head. “Just getting a drink.”

“That makes two of us.”’ Andy itches for another swallow, but she resists, laying her palms flat on the table instead.

Nile pads across the cold tile floor and fills a glass. But rather than turning to retreat upstairs again, she leans against the kitchen counter, cocking her head expectantly. “So what’s the occasion? The medieval lovebirds are sound asleep upstairs. I thought you’d be, too.”

“Reminiscing.” Without meaning to, Andy’s hand reaches to the pendant at her throat, the familiar cold weight.

Nike takes a slow sip of water. “About what?” The look on her face makes it clear she knows what Andy’s doing is almost certainly closer to  _ drowning your sorrows _ than  _ reminiscing _ .

“Quynh,” Andy says simply. The name is like the drop of a pebble of water, ripples radiating throughout the quiet kitchen.

Nile sets her glass of water down on the counter. “Oh.”

Andy’s thumb caresses the pendant, the familiar smooth edges memorized across centuries.

She has nothing else of Quynh. No photos, no sketches, no videos. If Nicky or Joe or Booker were to drop dead this instant, they’d still be immortalized in Copley’s wall of history, in Joe’s sketchbooks, in a dozen false IDs and faded photos. But Quynh sunk beneath the sea without a trace, leaving behind nothing more than scattered legends, this pendant, and the fading memories Andy clings to even as they slip away.

Andy heard once that the human body replaces itself completely every seven years, a ship of Theseus shedding dead cells and pumping fresh blood, building itself anew again and again. Each breath, each step, each pulse of veins and arteries, a piece of something new.

Even without the regeneration—the bullets and blood, skin sealing over and bones re-twisting into place—the body that loved Quynh is a hundred times gone. It was not these lips that mapped the base of Quynh’s throat, not these hands that memorized the curves of her body, not these arms that clung tight to her waist as they galloped across the steppes on horseback, not this throat that whooped a shared shout of wild joying echoing back from the sky’s vast blue expanse.

Immortality and death, they’re not as opposite as most think. Eternity just means shedding death like autumn leaves, ghost self after ghost self, no trace left behind but in the rattlings of your own haunted mind.

Oh, Quynh and Andy may live still. But Andy knows they’ll never be as they were and that, in itself, is a kind of death.

“I still dream of her,” Nile says quietly. “Does it ever stop?”

Andy laughs bitterly. “Better settle in for the long haul, kid. Booker’s been dreaming of her since the Industrial Revolution.”

“Oh.” Nile traces a finger around the rim of her glass of water, so carefully, as if the right precise movement. “There’s new technology, isn’t there? Sonar, submarines. We could—“

Andy cuts her off. “Whatever you’re thinking, we’ve tried it all. I’ve been looking for Quynh longer than your colonized excuse of a country has been on maps.”

The truth is: Andy dreams of Quynh, too. She dreams, and always wakes before Quynh speaks, knowing it’s because she can no longer conjure the sound of her voice.

Five hundred years is a long time and Andy’s memory has never been as infallible as her body.

“Nile,” Andy says tiredly. “Just go back to bed.” She rubs a finger along the wooden grain of the kitchen table, tracing the length of an old scar. She doesn’t remember what this safe house in the backwaters of Croatia was before they took it over, what careless knife or sharp edge could have scraped a line in the dark wood finish.

Sometimes in the past, Andy found herself wishing that she wouldn’t heal quite so well. That her wounds wouldn’t scab over in an instant and fade without a trace, that her skin wouldn’t look so unblemished from pain, that she wouldn’t move through the world betraying not a hint of the beatings she’s taken over the century. To live through a thousand battles and have no mark left from them but the ones on her mind felt wrong. A warrior’s body should be a map of survival but hers has been a canvas painted blank anew for millennia.

Well, she’s gotten her wish now, she supposed. That and quite a bit more.

The bullet wound in her stomach twinges. Not the spike of a fresh tear in flesh or the phantom ache of a long-sealed gash, but the steady throb of a wound slowly stitching back together, the healing kind of pain she’d almost forgotten.

Nike hasn’t left yet. Of course not—she’s neither the type to follow an order without reason nor the kind of person to leave a teammate alone in the dark with a bottle of vodka and a head of dark memories.

“There’s a story I heard many times,” Andy begins. “in the Mediterranean. Threads of fate and three sisters. One to spin, one to measure, and one to cut.”

Nile nods. She’s surely heard it before—it’s an old story, the kind that spreads and puts down roots where it can.

“I used to wonder if there was some truth to those stories, if maybe the second sister did more than measure. Maybe she set threads aside, away from the one who cut, and knotted them so they were drawn together.” Andy doesn’t believe that anymore, obviously—and if she did, she’d be more inclined to think the second sister was prone to carelessly setting aside threads in a twisted heap, only snipping them free when the thought at last crossed her mind. “I don’t think that anymore,” Andy finishes.

Maybe one day she’ll fish Quynh from the bottom of the ocean or maybe one day Quynh will drag herself from the depths of her iron coffin herself.

Maybe one day she will look the source of the iron lump of guilt in her stomach straight in her salt-worn eyes and know the pain in them is all her fault

But hell, she hopes it’s not because of fate. Andy would rather live in a world rudderless and unmoored from divine declaration than one in which such pain is decreed.

Booker thinks he knows pain, but really, he only knows loss, and five hundred years of both has taught Andy the difference.

To have love like that in your arms for millennia and feel it snatched away is nothing Booker could ever imagine.

“Nile,” Andy says. “Get some sleep.” She doesn’t say  _ We can talk about it in the morning _ because Andy has never been one for false promises, no matter the century.

If Quynh was simply dead—dead like Lykon bleeding out beneath her frantic hands, dead like Booker’s son wasting away in a hospital bed from a disease only a century away from treatable, dead in a way that would feel like agony unless you knew the twisting horror of the alternative—then, perhaps, she could let her memories fade away into the mist.

But wounds can’t heal with the knife still twisting inside your guts. This too, Andy has learned across centuries.

“Maybe we’ll find her one day,” Andy says, letting her fingers curl around the cool glass of the bottle. “But honestly, I have no fucking clue who she’ll be after five hundred years under the sea.”

For now, she holds tight to the Quynh of the past, the Quynh who exists only in fading memories cupped inside a once-indestructible skull.

“I hope so,” Nile says quietly. Then, glass of water in hand, she returns upstairs and Andy is left alone with half a bottle of vodka and five centuries of calcified guilt.

And for just a moment, the ache in Andy’s heart feels more like a tug, as if constricted by the tangling of a fated thread and on the other end is someone, thrashing.

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, what I really want from The Old Guard 2 is a lot of sexually charged fight scenes between Andy & Quynh followed by a reconciliation but that's not my writing speciality, so take a really dark spin on the soulmate thread idea instead, I guess?


End file.
